Alternatively, one can blame Wesley Livsey Jones, a U.S. Senator from Washington state from 1909-33. Jones used Mahan’s writings on the national defense implications of the commercial shipping industry to justify creating the provision that bears his name. To Mahan’s arguments, Jones added a healthy dose of economic protectionism, the primary purpose of which, to Jones and his constituents, was to ensure that citizens and businesses in Alaska would remain dependent on the shipping interests of his constituents in Seattle and the rest of Washington.


Particularly hard-hit by the Jones Act are non-contiguous U.S. territories and states, such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam. With few alternate means of transporting goods, the impact in those areas on the cost of living and the cost of doing business is significant. A series of studies from the General Accounting Office during the great Jones Act debates of the 1980s and ’90s found that the Act costs residents of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska between $2.8 billion and $9.8 billion a year over what the freight rates would be without the Jones Act.

In 2012, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported on the impact of the Jones Act on Puerto Rico, calling the act a likely factor in the high cost of shipping to Puerto Rico and in the fact that Puerto Rican ports lag behind other regional ports in activity level. The report stated, “It costs an estimated $3,063 to ship a twenty-foot container of household and commercial goods from the East Coast of the United States to Puerto Rico; the same shipment costs $1,504 to nearby Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and $1,687 to Kingston (Jamaica)—destinations that are not subject to Jones Act restrictions.”

Much more:https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-sinking-ship-of-cabotage-how-the-jones-act-lets-unions-and-a-few-companies-hold-the-economy-hostage/